CVS Also Does This!

Remember how Wash got super frustrated when everyone pronounced EMP wrong?… Well.. I made.. A thing

Here are some scientific facts about blood loss for all you psychopaths writers out there.

After two long nights, it’s finally finished

Suckers

I’ve been lied to

What some person says: You need to do research for fantasy and think critically about how your world functions. How did they domesticate those creatures, and how are they feeding them? How are your cities fed, and what happens to their waste? How are all those soldiers trained and paid? Have you googled feudalism? 

What y’all think they mean: fill your book with unnecessary factual details about your fantasy world that no one cares about 

What they actually mean: You need to know the way your world functions for your own benefit, to be able to create a story that makes sense and holds up under scrutiny. If you don’t research, you’ll end up repeating dumb stereotypes about Medieval England that are more based on modern biases than real history and making grotesque factual errors that will make your story unreadable for anyone that paid more attention in class than you did. Not to mention that your pool of inspiration will be entirely based in other, already written fantasies, instead of the vast, colorful and woefully untapped well of actual human history. 

the suffering never ends

Don’t just accept the new Terms of Service

Tumblr’s at it again, thanks to the new European Privacy Laws. There’s probably nobody who will read this, but it pissed me off so much that I decided to make a post about it. (Ignore the weird language mish-mash, depending on your country the language might differ.)

OK, so many of us get this screen when we try to access our dash:

Realise how the ‘OK’ button is a nice, attention-grabbing blue? If you’re like me, you’re not exactly into reading a 100 pages document and tend to just click it.

My tip? DONT. Instead click on ‘Manage Options’ right next to it:

Now you’ll see this page:

Still pretty harmless, right? That ‘Accept’ button is looking really attractive right now. Instead, click on Verwalten (Probably something like ‘Manage Options’ or something in english) and you’ll get to this page:

Now that’s not too bad, right? I just switched all the buttons to ‘off’, because I’m jealously guarding my personal information and don’t want Tumblr to go off and do who knows what with it. Looks like we’re done! But wait: There’s a SHOW option.

When we click on that one, what we will get is this:

A HUGE list with OVER 300 ENTRIES of companies that can use your data by default if you’d just clicked ‘OK’ on that very first page. Coincidence that this list is hidden that much? Me thinks not. They’re all switched on by default, but I am still a petty bitch that doesn’t want to give out her data, so I switched them all off. All 300+ of them. There is no option to switch them all off at once, and even if you disable all the options above, the companies are still switched on.

(If you wonder how i got that number, I copied the list into excel and looked at the cell number. No way am I actually counting all those entries)

God Creating The Netherlands

God: “So, yeah. Make a small country and also make it entirely flat. No mountains, only hills. A whole bunch in the south of it by the way.

Angel: “Sure, that doesn’t sound too bad?”

God: “Oh, and make it under the sea level. So they have a to build dikes to make sure the whole country doesn’t get flooded. 

Angel: “What the…”

God: “Dikes everywhere”

God: “And…what rhymes with dikes? Oh yes, bikes! Bikes everywhere!”

Angel: “You mean that they…’’

God: “Have a lot of bikes? Yes! Let them always cycle. Make everyone who isn’t cycling afraid of the cyclists. Especially the tourists.

Angel: “This starts to sound a lot more dangerous”

God: “What else did I have in mind? Oh yeah, make the weather there unpredictable as hell. Only one thing is sure, there will always be lot of rain”

Angel: “I start to feel sorry for those people…How do you want to call it?”

God: “Mmm, The Netherlands. But we call the people Dutch”

Angel: “Why…”

God: “And everyone mixes them up with their neighbourland Germany”

Angel: “Okay..anything else?’’

God: “Weed”

Angel: “That’s it. I quit”

If you believe “Kill all blacks” is racist (which it is) but “Kill all whites” isn’t racist or vice versa, you just proved you hold a double standard.

If you believe “Trans people suck” is transphobic (which it is) but “Cis people suck” isn’t cisphobic or vice versa, you just proved you hold a double standard.

If you believe “men hitting women for reasons other self defense” is abuse (which it is) but believe “women beating men for reasons other than self defense” isn’t abuse or vice versa, you just proved you hold a double standard.

If you believe treating females poorly for being female is sexist (which it is) but believe treating males poorly for being male isn’t sexist or vice versa, you just proved you hold a double standard.

If you believe “Homosexuals/bisexuals are horrible people” is homophobic/biphobic (which it is) but believe “Heterosexuals are horrible people” isn’t heterophobic or vice versa, you just proved you hold a double standard.

If you believe “Muslims need to be wiped out” is Islamophobic (which it is), but think “Christians need to be wiped out” isn‘t Christianophobic or vice versa, you just proved you hold a double standard

Double Standards are NOT OKAY

TL:DR The double standard doesn’t have to be on a wide scale, it can be as simple as what people say

Using the appropriate vocabulary in your novel

It is very important that the language in your novel reflects the time and place in which the story is set.

For example, my story is set in Italy. My characters would never “ride shotgun”, a term coined in US in the early 1900s referring to riding alongside the driver with a shotgun to gun bandits. 

Do your research! A free tool that I found to be very useful is Ngram Viewer. 

You can type any word and see when it started appearing in books. For example…one of my characters was going to say “gazillion” (I write YA) in 1994. Was “gazillion” used back then?

And the answer is…YES! It started trending in 1988 and was quite popular in 1994.

Enjoy ^_^